The Philosophy of Mystery

“We so intreateth this serious and terrible matter of Spirites, that now and then insertyng some strange stories of counterfeyts, doth both very lybely display their falsehood,...

A sentiment something like this, I believe, was the grand cause of the enrolment of the mummies by the Egyptians; for they thought while the body remained entire, the soul was f...

The father of Doctor Blomberg, clerk of the closet to George IV., was captain in an army serving in America. We are told by Doctor Rudge, that six officers, three hundred miles...

Recollect, Astrophel, this is an old point with us, when we were reading the subject of _Auguries_, in his book, “De Divinatione,” in which he wonders “that one soothsayer can l...

Now here is a tissue of events, as strange as they are circumstantial; and I might set myself to illustrate the apparition by the agitated state of Mr. Alsop’s mind, were it not...

It was in the year ——, on the eve of my presenting myself at the college for my diploma. I had been deeply engaged during the day, in tracing, with some fellow students, the dis...

Now, although the coming on of death is often attended by that slight delirium indicated by the babbling of green fields, and the playing with flowers, and the picking of the be...

In other cases, especially in accomplished minds, the phantasy is usually combined with _derangement of health_. A very ingenuous and elegant young lady, about the age of sevent...

We have _Myopia_, or short sight; _Presbyopia_, or long sight; _Chrupsia_, or coloured vision. We have night-blindness, or dim vision, and day-blindness, or intolerance of light...

Speed repeats a record in the “Ypodigma Neustriæ” of “Walsingham,” that the rebellion of the Percies was preceded by spectral battles in Bedfordshire, “sundry monsters of divers...

It was midnight, when in the ear of an old harper, a shrill voice whispered, ‘Edivar, Edivar;’ and a little bird hovered over him, and flew out of the palace in the pale moonshi...

I remember, when I was a child, the prevalent belief in Horsham, that, at a certain hour of the night, the ghost of Mrs. Hamel was heard groaning in her vault, beneath the great...

“Every castle, tower, or manor-house has its visionary inhabitants. ‘The Cauld Lad of Hilton’ belongs to a very common and numerous class, the brownie or domestic spirit, and se...

May we not fear that, like the Promethean Preadamites of Shelley, the Cain of Byron, the fabled beings of Ovid, and the mythology of Milton, will be the vaunted discoveries of t...

EV. As you do, Ida. As to the atheist, one, perchance, may have _lived_, if we rightly interpret the sentiments of Diogenes, and Bion, and Lucian, and Voltaire; but, I believe,...

EV. Study the causes of _insomnia_, or sleeplessness, Ida; as those which excite nervous irritability,—coffee, green tea, _small_ doses of opium, the protracted use of antimony,...

But the records of antiquity teem with tales of fatal prognostics to heroes, kings, and emperors, whose deaths, indeed, seldom took place without a prophecy. From Aristotle we l...

And yet my Astrophel will lean to the vagaries of our pseudo-psychologists, who believed the dream to be the flight of the soul on a visit to other regions; and its observation...

In the “City of Dreams,” of Lucian, the blasphemer (whose beauties are stained by their impieties), these eternal gates are again alluded to. But the dreams in this city are all...

Even Dr. Abercrombie is content with observing that the correction of illusions by the sane mind is by the comparing power of reason, but he leaves the _illusion itself unexplai...

Nightingales’ notes (as Bechstein has beautifully recorded them) seem to me like the Mexican language, and to express variety of sentiments of adoration and love. The parrot, ma...

Now whatever influence tends to arrest or derange the _upper circulation_ of the blood in its return to the heart, or to detain it in the vessels of the brain, or which presses...

We must confess, with Socrates, that the extent of our knowledge is indeed but a conviction of our ignorance. The metaphor of Sir Isaac Newton, on the insignificance of his own...

Such would have been the result, according to poetical justice, in the beautiful romance of “La Sonnambula.” Had Amina been awakened while she was descending, she would probably...

It is our duty, then, not to slight the condition of the somnambulist. If _simple irritation_ be its exciting cause, much benefit may be derived from _counter-action_ on the sur...

Idiocy is the most abject and imperfect condition of the waking mind, resembling closely the first disposition to slumber, the sensation of _doziness_. The creature will commit...

Dr. Harvest, of Ditton, a very learned man, would unconsciously allow his horse to be loosened from his grasp, and walk home _with the bridle on his arm_. He would walk into his...

The sensation in the brain of the cataleptic, as of those recovering from drowning, resembles the pricking of needles, the circulation soon becoming accelerated. Hunger is usual...

“My mother being sick to death of a fever three months after I was born, which was the occasion she nursed me no longer, her friends and servants thought, to all outward appeara...

“Then let not piety be put to flight, To please the taste of glutton appetite; But suffer innate souls secure to dwell, Lest from their seats your parents you expel: With rabid...

EV. The last is a very frail experiment. Paysegur often failed in his illustrations, and then the cunning juggler explained this, by affirming that the trees counter-magnetized...

One folly more. Mesmer himself vaunted to Dr. Von Ellikon, “twenty years ago I magnetized the sun;” &c. so that the miracle of Joshua was but a stroke of magnetism. Indeed, Rich...

EV. Such was the trial of _ordeal_ instituted for the test of innocence. Among the Anglo-Saxons, as all the chronicles of their history will show, this mode of trial prevailed;...